Thought all dinosaurs were beastly? Meet the 2-pound Fruitadens, an agile critter that's now the smallest on record from North America. The newly identified species stood about 4 inches tall and measured 28 inches from head to tail, said Luis Chiappe, director of the Los Angeles Natural History Museum's Dinosaur Institute, where the dinosaur's fossilized bones are stored.
The Fruitadens haagarorum, which fed on both meat and greens, had to be nimble to survive the hazardous time in which it lived -- the late Jurassic period about 150 million years ago, which was ruled by giant meat-eaters.
It was so tiny and fast that it probably darted between the legs of larger dinosaurs, researchers said.
The findings, reported by Chiappe and an international team of dinosaur experts, appeared Wednesday in the British science journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The fossils were unearthed in Fruita, Colo., in the late 1970s but only recently classified as a new species (named after the bones' resting place and the head of the museum's board of trustees, Paul Haaga).
There is a bias among dinosaur hunters in favor of the big carnivores at the expense of the smaller animals, Chiappe explained. That is reflected in museum exhibits.But in fact, "It's fair to say there were as many small animals as large ones," Chiappe said. Much less is known, however, about the smaller ones. NEWS SERVICES
